


to one already dead

by LiliaFax



Series: at the end of the day [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pale Prostitution, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Poverty, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Loathing, Species Discrimination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 10:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiliaFax/pseuds/LiliaFax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a newly regenerated world, Eridan, estranged from the other game players, falls on some hard times and starts being a prostitute for pale romance.</p><p>Turns out there is a section of trolls who want to pay to calm a highblood out of a rage and shoosh them afterwards. Eridan takes those jobs for the money to make ends meet and discovers that his growing self-hatred and festering guilt make perfect traits for business.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to one already dead

**Author's Note:**

> from a [prompt on the kinkmeme](http://homesmut.dreamwidth.org/39135.html?thread=43366879#cmt43366879)  
> Actually already posted there. But I decided to move it here because I liked it well enough and I have a sequel planned out that I'm going to try my hardest and actually write and make a longer length than this silly nonsense, and AO3 allows me to post a sequel easier.

_Don't they know they're_  
 _Making love to one already dead?_  


_-"Lovely Ladies", Les Misérables_

\---

Seven dollars and twenty-seven cents.

You have seven dollars and twenty-seven cents in your wallet and that’s all you have coming until you get your next paycheck. Then you need to put most of that away to pay your rent and utilities, but at least at the end of the week you’ll be able to feel a bit more secure in your ability to eat for the next week. 

Besides, you do have another source of money you can go to. You utilize it far more than you used to be comfortable with, but when it comes to paying for everything you need to survive, you are completely willing to do what you have to do.

It’s a huge slap to your pride, your stupid pride, what got you in trouble in the first place. But everything you have in your life is entirely your fault, you are aware of that pathetic fact, and you are now more than ever aware of what that fact means for the rest of your life.

You jimmy your apartment lock a little to get it open, pushing through the stick in the door jam, and strip off your coat immediately. You want to get out of your work clothes as soon as possible. They feel awfully restrictive and dirty rough on your skin. You hate them, you hate the clothes just as much as you hate what they represent. Your failure to be a decent being, a world where you might be punished for your transgressions but everyone else might be going down with you.

You work for about minimum wage. It’s one of the few jobs you can get. In this new regenerated Earth, where trolls have lived among humans for at least three decades, the power hierarchies are distorted from what you grew up with. You know that among troll communities lowbloods are still looked-down upon, you’ve seen it happen. However, in the human power system, the situation is flipped. Lowblood trolls are more likely to get far in human society than highbloods.

This is a problem because humans dominate this planet.

Highbloods have a reputation, from what doesn’t matter, of being unstable monsters. You’ve felt this first hand as you tried to deal on this planet (without the help of your former friends, mind you), and were turned down from job after job, internship after internship, all for increasingly petty and transparent reasons.

It wasn’t until a human woman straight up looked at you in an interview, right in the eyes, and told you that you were “a liability to the company, the insurance for you would be catastrophic to our budget”. 

“We’re very sorry, Mr. Ampora, but you see our dilemma. Perhaps if you earn a degree, the answer might be different.”

The thing is, you have thought about getting your degree, multiple times. One of your last communications with the others indicated that many members of the group were going to university. However, you lack the funds and the time. You have started a savings fund for college, a sizably growing thing that you will use to get a degree in business or the like. No lofty dreams of studying historical conquerors and battles for you anymore. You’ve grown out of your childish things, it’s time to be practical with what you need. You need something that will get you out of the thumb of poverty you have found yourself in.

Shedding the work uniform is like being doused in bleach. You feel free of the contaminants that stick to the fibers and leech into your skin, of the lingering looks and whispers from the humans and even some lowbloods around you. You feel more like the troll you knew yourself to be growing up. You feel light as bubbles of air under your skin, feet, lifting you away from this place.

The scalding water of the shower also pierces into your pores, dripping into your blood and dragging through your veins like lava. 

You dress up for the night in your best clothes, the ones that evoke your highblood past and make you seem more haughty and well-off than you really currently are. The clothes themselves aren't even that great compared to what you wore when you were six. The fabric isn't as high quality, the seams fray and the thread pulls. The pants are just a tad too short. But at least you've kept one vital aspect of the get up which you think probably determines your nightly success. Each ring is cold and heavy in your fingers, tarnished just a little in places, the luster and shine dulled from miniature suns to dying light bulbs. But they do the job. Your customers expect you, as a highblood, to be wearing jewelry, so you put on your old rings every night before you leave. Sometimes you wonder why you didn't pawn the rings before you got to this point, perhaps some remnant of your shattered pride, but now you don't even consider it.

When you look in the mirror hanging above the stained plastic ivory sink, you don't feel your throat stick as it usually does. The light does make your skin glow sallow and shadows your cheekbones and eye sockets, giving you a deep sunken look of a dead troll, but at least your hair looks presentable. You slick it back with some water; the purple strip of your wigglerhood is long gone. You let some of your forelocks hang on your forehead, anything to make you look less like your dancestor, the better. Your glasses are newly clean and perched on your nose proper. You look the correct amount of highblood arrogance and pitiful wreck to get exactly what you are aiming for. At least, enough to be what they are looking for. Seeing yourself dolled up like some pale ghost of your former self makes your chest give a dull throb along your fault lines, but you've tacked them shut so the throb never bleeds to anything more.

You leave your shitty apartment and lock the door, wrapping your coat around you like a shield. You have work to do. That's all this is, just work.  
\----  
Your first customer is a short, pretty olive-blood, who waits patiently for you to get ready and watches you with bright eyes lined in gold. It's not your first time with her, and you know how she operates. She has a gentle touch and a clear warmness to her face that tugs at that internal part of you broken by your circumstance.

You throw your coat away and work yourself to a decent rage. You have learned what will trigger your highblood psychosis and how to pull it quickly. You imagine blood, fire, war, and dead trolls around you, the scent filling your nose like so much decay. You imagine that your quadrants are among those dead or maybe they are prisoners. It makes your blood boil through your veins, simmering and slow, creeping into your eyes.

You swing a punch to the motel wall, relishing the way the pain sparks across your hand and shoots lightening into your brain. It jolts the last bit of your rage into effect. You feel the chemical burn of it across your nerves.

She lets you work yourself until you’re seething through your teeth before she approaches on light feet. Your senses scream at you to fight lash grab kill as she pulls you down to the pile already prepared on the floor. You scrabble against her, feeling the warm pulse of her blood, and you think your clawed fingers find purchase on her skin a few time, but you can’t really tell when your brain is firing this way. She pushes you down and you fight back, struggle good under her weight and even manage to push up and nearly break away a few times. But she grabs your wrists and pins them above your head and straddles your hips in a way that you can’t kick.

Her free hand strokes your cheek and paps you fervently. 

“Shoosh,” her voice like panacea for your newly burnt nerves drags you away from your rage.

You whimper for her and she seems to like it, moving to pet your hair and murmuring more shooshes. Her hand on your wrists starts to ease, which is good as your hands are starting to feel numb.

Next comes the part you dread the most. Some customers are content with just calming you out of a highblood rage, but some want to go all the way in the pale department. It requires you to expend more emotional energy than you feel comfortable with sometimes, but you do what you must

The oliveblood on you starts to work under your shirt, running her hands on the tense muscles of your back. You relax into her ministrations in spite of yourself, or maybe because you really want it, you’ve lost track of what you do and don’t want at this point. You know that after your rage you are like putty to your hormones and brain chemicals and you hope you don’t do anything stupid like this.

“Oh dear, you’ve needed this for a long time haven’t you,” she croons to you, starting to pull your shirt up your chest so she has more skin to skin access. “You’re a stressed troll, aren’t you? Come, I’ll take care of you, tell me what is bothering you. You wreck of a troll.”

Your self-hatred always bubbles up at the worst time from its den right under your pores and you feel the oppressive weight of it in your eyes and throat. She’s calling you a wreck and although on some objective level you know it’s just her playing the part, it cracks down to the festering rotten core of you and dredges up the infection that is slowly poisoning you every day.

You are a failure.

You killed the only troll you ever loved.

You were going to sell yourself out because you are a coward coward coward.

And a coward deserves nothing more than what has come to you.

Your temporary moirail wipes the tears from your face before the start to fall in earnest. She chirps at your from the back of her throat. “Come now, you silly boy. Let yourself cry.”

Your sobs rock your body in her arms as she whispers and pets and soothes. And you want to tell her to explain. The pressure of your hatred and despair threatens to tear you apart ever moment of every day but you know you can’t tell her or anyone because she doesn’t care. All she wants is to make herself feel good and powerful, that she’s calming a highblood, a god damn fucking unstable highblood. You have this revelation every time and every time it hits you with the same intensity of a runaway train. It causes fresh tears to well up among the ones you are already shedding. 

She lets you cry yourself empty in her arms and even holds you for a while as you gather your wits again. If you close your eyes you can imagine that you are being held by an actual moirail, that you are in a different world where you are cared for and cared about. The pulse around you is comforting and you lose yourself, just for a moment, in your own hormone-induced bliss.

But then she unwraps her arms from you and the illusion is shattered and you are left sitting in the shards of reality and rough edges. She pulls on her coat and gets her wallet out of her pocket. You pull yourself up and go to watch and make sure she doesn’t try to leave without paying. You’ve had it happen before (someone thought they could pull a fast one on you because you were young. Turns out that you haven’t lost that much of the fighting ability drilled into you on Alternia). She counts out the payment, licking her lips thoughtfully, and puts it into your outstretched hand. You quickly count the money for yourself and satisfied that it’s all there, give her the nod to leave. She kisses the knuckles of your free hand, as she always does, and moves to the door.

“Hey kid,” she says at the doorframe and arrests you in your return to the pile on the floor. You look up and try not to seem too invested on her every word.

“You always look pretty banged up about something there. I know it’s not my place, I’m just, you know, paying for ya, but maybe you should find yourself a real moirail. You really do look like a wreck.”

With that, she leaves and clicks the door behind her. 

You are left grabbing at your own edges that are threatening to fall apart and spill your guts on the floor. She couldn’t know, she couldn’t possibly care. Why would she want to help you, that would just make her lose her outlet. You sniff and realize again that as much as you want to find someone to protect you and fix you, put you back together again, you don’t deserve it and you need to keep your crippling need to one so that you can keep this little bit of income. After all, it’s all you’re really good for at this point. What does she know? She doesn’t even know your real name.

You sink to the pile and hug your legs to your chest and just let yourself feel empty.

You are Eridan Ampora.

And now you are nothing more than seven dollars and twenty-seven cents.

Nothing at all.


End file.
